Legends

by Unknown Author

  “Me? I’m about to shut down the Master Mold!”

  At that point, several things happened. There was another thump, this one buckling the doors. Cassidy’s attention went from the terminal to the doors just as the guard held prisoner screamed and launched himself at the Irishman. Cassidy went down hard, a throbbing pain in the back of his skull suddenly blossoming to keep the dull ache in his arm company. The guard punched Cassidy in the mouth, screaming unintelligibly. And all the while, Wisdom stood before the superuser console and swore at it.

  Cassidy, feeling his jaw swell, brought his knee up hard into the thug’s groin. The screaming stopped, and Cassidy could swear he saw surprise behind the man’s red-tinted goggles. With a frustration and ferocity borne of the situation, Cassidy brought the gun butt hard into the side of the man’s head.

  For just a moment, as the lackey fell unconscious, Cassidy thought the loud report that accompanied his blows was just his anger contributing to the force of the swing. But once he pushed the man off him, Cassidy saw the real source of the cacophony—two more of the canine Sentinels, buzzing electronically in a way that sounded like they were growling.

  “Yes!” Wisdom yelled, oblivious to the monstrosities behind him.

  Cassidy got into a kneeling position and squeezed the trigger, sending a stream of bullets across the Sentinels’ legs and snouts. The two moved back as one in response to the attack. One of the canine nightmares hunched down, allowing a panel to open up on its back.

  “Wisdom! They’re here!” Cassidy yelled. He spayed bullets at the armed Sentinel. Hot lead flew across the creatures’ backs, some of the stray bullets spanging into the hatch. The overheating of the interior mechanisms caused the Sentinel to break in two under the force of the resulting explosion. Wisdom looked up, then back. He swore in a tone loud enough to echo off the walls. Spreading his arms wide, aiming one finger at the cooling vent, the other at the Sentinel, Wisdom let fly, sending hot knives into both objects.

  Cassidy dived down as the platelets of superheated plasma jetted in his direction. He heard the satisfying crackling pop of the remaining Sentinel’s sensor dome bursting, followed by a deafing hiss of steam directly behind him. Looking up, Sean saw the front half of the Sentinel scrabbling along on its two forepaws, obviously still locked in on his mutant signature. Cassidy ran backwards, aware of the damp heat of the punctured cooling vent, and shot again, chipping away at the robot’s armor.

  “On your feet, Cassidy!” Wisdom shouted over the noise. He had moved to the B3 teminal and punched in some commands. Spinning, he sent a set of hot knives hurtling into the Sentinel’s head, slicing it to ribbons. Moving toward Cassidy, he put his hands together, grinned and shot a full complement of plasma into the now broken vent.

  The whump of the energy striking home rang in Cassidy’s ears. Wisdom grabbed Cassidy’s hand and pulled him up. There was a series of smaller noises the Irishman found disturbing, followed by a changing of the steam into smoke. “Let’s find us a support wall,” his partner suggested.

  The two ran out of the room. Cassidy felt his pain dull as another adreneline surge hit him. In the hallway, Hammer’s lackeys were running around, leaderless and uncomprehending in the face of chaos. Cassidy let fly with another short burst to push them back just as an explosion under their feet shook the whole mansion. “Every man for himself!” he advised the hapless Hammer employees.

  Wisdom scanned the area for an exit. The quiet country-club-like atmosphere of Hammer’s hideaway was being pushed aside for the ambiance of a war zone—shattered glass, falling masonry, flames, and thundering noise. Cassidy was surprised to find himself calm in the middle of all this. He was intimate with this sort of catastrophe; a similar act of destruction took his wife away from him. That he was the cause of this glimpse into hell occurred to him, but Sean continued telling himself the cause was just—as was the cause that cost him his powers.

  “Window!” Wisdom shouted over the thunder. Smoke obscured their vision. As they rushed to the glass gateway to safety, Cassidy tried desperately to figure out what floor they were on.

  “Faith!” Cassidy exclaimed as they came up fast on the window. He threw up his hands as they hit the barrier. “Fm gettin’ too old for this!”

  He felt the glass shatter and give way, some of it slashing through the cloth of his outfit. Cassidy felt for one blissful moment that sense of weightlessness he used to experience when he flew on waves of sonic energy. But then the ground came up to meet him and he landed hard, tumbling end over end out onto the perfectly manicured lawn.

  Sean sat there for a moment, feeling the adrenaline high slowly leech out of him, restoring the varied aches and pains he was able to focus beyond moments before. He looked back at Hammer’s home; thick smoke billowed from the openings, and an ominous groaning rumble was increasing in volume.

  “Eight-point-eight by fifty-one! Prepare Cape Clear landing port! Situation Red!” Wisdom shouted, apparently to thin air, before turning to Cassidy and saying, “No time for woolgathering, man, we have to run!”

  Cassidy got to his feet and took off after the retreating agent. Wisdom repeated his curious statement, and headed for the tennis courts.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Cassidy shouted as the red clay of the playing field came into view.

  “Subdermal transmitter,” Wisdom shouted back. “Kept us in contact with Cully. Have to get the damn thing out once we’re safe; it’s like having a poxy beesting on your jaw that won’t go away!”

  A small flight of stairs led to the courts. Off in the distance, a helicopter was speeding to their position. Cassidy looked at his partner, feeling every single one of the cuts and bruises and bumps he had earned doing what needed doing. “And that time in the main computer room—you were consulting with Cully?”

  Wisdom raised an eyebrow. “You think I was talking to myself?” he asked, taking a moment to catch his breath. “You are a right toerag sometimes.”

  Another explosion could be heard in the distance, this one powerful enough to cause the trees to shake. The two looked back and saw a column of oily, black smoke where the mansion once stood. Cassidy couldn’t help but smile, even as he calculated the number of hours his present lover, Dr. Moira MacTaggart, was going to spend berating him for his wounds. The aircraft moved closer, and Cassidy could hear the thrum of its rotors over the flickering of the flames.

  But there was another noise—hoofbeats, heralding the arrival of a horse, upon which sat Hammer. To Cassidy’s amazement, even though the man was covered in dirt and grime, he still managed to appear elegant.

  “This is not good,” Cassidy said.

  Following Hammer out of the woods was a cadre of a half-dozen torn, tattered, and aching gunmen. With their soiled, ripped uniforms and unsteady gaits, they did not look happy to be in their boss’s employ at this moment. Hammer brought his mount to the tennis court’s edge. “You had to go and muck things up,” spat out Justin Hammer.

  “Of course, you poncy tosser,” Wisdom spat back. “That’s our job.” Before the gunmen could advance, the agent laid down a spray of hot knives at their feet. The helicopter was on top of them now, and a rope ladder was being thrown down.

  “I will make certain you pay for interfering in this operation, sir,” Hammer said.

  “How? You and your ragamuffin brigade aren’t a threat anymore— just a toerag sitting on a pile of broken masonry. And you can’t believe those lager louts are going to impede our flight into the sunset.”

  The industrialist’s face reddened. “You ruined my home!”

  Cassidy smiled as he grabbed hold of the ladder. Shouting over the sound of the rotors, he said, “And what evidence d’ye have, boyo? I’m willing to bet all your security tapes are up in smoke.”

  Sean began climbing the ladder to freedom. Wisdom laid down another blanket of hot knives, singing the lawn at the edges of the tennis court. As he grabbed onto the lowest rung, the agent laughed and said, “Go on back to Americ
a, you git. Your homeland doesn’t want you.” And then the rumpled looking Brit followed Cassidy up the ladder.

  This time, Cassidy agreed to have a pint with the agent. Wisdom was dressed as he was when first they met, the degree of disorder inherent in his dress unchanged. There was a lot less tension in the air this time, as if the other intelligence agents realized that Wisdom had accepted Cassidy as one of them. They clinked glasses before drinking. The toast was silent. Cassidy’s involved a wish that he never did anything that foolish again.

  “Reports indicate that Hammer has turned his operations around. He’s America’s problem once again,” Wisdom remarked.

  “Do ye think the Master Mold is gone?”

  “Rather. We overheated that place’s power plant. Anything needing temperature regulation is useless now.”

  “If you say,” Cassidy remarked. “I just don’t want to think about those things again.”

  “Wish I had the luxury, Cassidy.” Wisdom checked his watch. “I have a meeting with Stuart in fifteen.”

  “The W.H.O. head?”

  Wisdom nodded. “Wants a debrief. Ask me, he’s going to just burden me with paperwork. I’ll find some way to get out of it, though.”

  Wisdom walked into the main meeting room of the Spire, the obsidian building that housed the offices of Black Air. Very few outside the building had heard of the organization, and then only in whispers: there were even some government officials unaware of the purpose of the irregularly shaped office tower that threw its shadow over North London. Wisdom’s heels clicked on the floor as he approached three men with predatory eyes sitting on a raised dais.

  Wisdom produced the diskette from his jacket and placed it on the dais. He averted his eyes from the gaze of his superiors. “There you are—all the schemata and information Hammer had on Sentinel technology.”

  The middle official, tall and spider-thin, retrieved the diskette with insectile fingers. “vErY gOoD, WiSdOm. We ArE pLeAsEd.”

  The man on the left raised one bushy eyebrow. “Your cover to the Cassidy man is intact?”

  “Had no reason to think otherwise,” offered Wisdom in a voice as brittle as old leaves.

  “Proceed to Omega branch, Agent Wisdom,” added the man on the right in a phlegmy voice. “There have been developments in the Cyt-torak situation.”

  Wisdom pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “Right. Top man, that’s me.” He headed out, thinking all the while, I’m getting too moral for this.

  The Stranger Inside

  Jennifer Heddle

  May 4243 Tuesday

  For crying out loud, I don’t even know what the date is today. I bet Storm or Alex would know, but I’m not about to make a fool out of myself by asking. It doesn’t matter what day of the month it is, anyway, or even what month it is in the first place. Everything’s always the same here, day in and day out. It’s enough to make a girl crazy.

  Heck, maybe 1 am crazy, to even be thinking about writing in here. I’m still not sure why I’m doing it. Professor Xavier told me a long time ago that keeping a diary might help me deal with all the stuff going on in my head, but I laughed at him back then, thought he was the crazy one for suggesting I write anything more complicated than a grocery list. Now though, things are different. The Professor’s gone, and, well, maybe this is the least I can do for him since I wasn’t real great to him when he was here. Better than nothing, right?

  Who am I kidding? The truth is, Inferno really did a number on me, what with members of the team turning against each other, that horrible evil I felt when I kissed Warren Worthington, my showdown with that demon, Nasty—and I guess it can’t hurt to try using a diary to help me sort things out. Besides, it’s not like the rest of the X-Men are falling all over themselves to take my mind off things or help me feel better.

  I found this notebook in an abandoned room in the ghost town where we’re living right now, me and the rest of the X-Men. The Reavers left it a shambles when they cleared out but there’s lotsa buried treasure to be found if you look hard enough. There were a bunch of recipes scribbled on the first few pages but it was all for food I’d rather die than eat so I just ripped them out and threw them away where no one’d find them because I didn’t want Psylocke getting her hands on them and making us alligator stew for dinner. Yuck! Times like this I

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  make fried chicken worth anything and sometimes I think I’d beg, borrow, or steal for a real sweet potato pie.

  Geez, Is this what I’m supposed to be writing about? Food? The Professor’s not here to tell me what’s right and I don’t know what I’m doing. Maybe I should just give up now before I do something really stupid.

  Friday

  Well I’m back. I don’t like to think of myself as a quitter so I’m not going to give up on this even if I’m the only one who knows about it.

  The Professor told me way back when that I should try writing down my feelings about Carol Danvers being trapped inside my head, but the problem is I don’t understand what I’m feeling half the time. Right now all I know is that I’m sick of her being in my head and taking over my life. I don’t want her here, I didn’t ask for it. But I don’t see that there’s anything either one of us can do about it any time soon.

  Storm’s yelling for a team meeting, so I gotta go. At least she still considers me part of the team. I guess that’s something.

  May 16

  What a wonderful surprise!

  This journal I discovered in Rogue’s possession brings back long-forgotten memories of my childhood, i used to hide up in my room on rainy afternoons, recording my hopes and dreams in the diary I’d bought with my allowance money. I remember that it was small, hardbound, and white, with pink roses etched around the border, and of course a shiny gold lock with a key to keep my secrets safe from the rest of the family. It made me feel so important, to have a lock and key of my very own,

  I have to laugh now at the thought of what I used to write in those pages. I can remember with surprising clarity my girlish plans for an ideal future: marry a doctor or a lawyer or a military man like my father, have a brood of children, and live in an elegant colonial home on the outskirts of Boston or Washington, where I would host tea parties and be the chair of the local PTA. Such “normal"

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  room in my life for pipe dreams for a very long time.

  Not that I ever could have predicted how the cards of my life would be dealt—Kree powers, a stint with the Avengers, giving birth to Marcus, and now this: trapped in the body of a mutant. My life—my very being—has been forcibly taken from me and I fear I will never be whole again. Instead I lurk in the recesses of Rogue’s mind, waiting for the occasional opportunity to take control, to try to construct some semblance of a life. Not that it’s much of a life in any case, since I can't even touch anyone skin to skin—Rogue's bizarre mutant power sees to that.

  Where are those white picket fences and car pools now? Sometimes I think I’d trade my soul for a station wagon. Even one of those horrible wood-paneled ones.

  Monday

  GET OUT OF HERE! Why do you have to be everywhere? Can’t I have something, anything for myself? Anything?

  Tuesday

  I can’t believe the nerve Carol has, writing in here. I’m not sure how much more of this I can take. I’m not even alone in my own body and I never know when Carol is going to take over and banish me to the back comers of my mind and I’m starting to feel like I really could split in two, into two different people, not just two minds but two bodies and even then I’d still have her in my head all the time. I keep having nightmares about it. I was hoping they’d stop coming so much when I started writing stuff down in here, but it hasn’t helped yet. Maybe the Professor really was wrong about this.

  May 20

  Well, it seems that Rogue has not taken kindly to my “intrusion.” I suppose I should once again remind her that it is her fault
I'm trapped in here, and that if we can share a body—no matter how difficult that may be—we should somehow be able to figure out how to share the pages of a black marble notebook.

  I was foolish to forget that Roaue couldn’t care less what1 1 r~“'-

  I am an invader in her life and nothing more. Still, I wish she’d keep in mind how I wound up here in the first place.

  On a lighter note, it could have been worse—at least she didn’t, in the midst of her rage, hurl this notebook out her window like some sort of projectile weapon and hurt somebody. Not everyone on the team is as impervious as Colossus, and Rogue’s strength (stolen from me, I might add), already gets her into enough trouble as it is.

  You stole my life, Rogue; now I’m stealing some pages of your notebook. It seems like an uneven trade to me, with you still holding on to the advantage.

  Thursday

  Fine. So Carol thinks she can take over this diary just like she takes over everything else in my life. Leech. I’ll just ignore her, is all. She can write whatever she wants but I don’t have to read it. This is my notebook. I found it first.

  Little Miss Perfect. I bet she doesn’t even mind being stuck out here in the middle of nowhere, as long as she’s got the other X-Men around. I get so jealous when they bring Carol up—I know they like her better than they like me. I just wish they weren’t so dam obvious about it. I put my life on the line just as much as anybody else, but I’ll never be able to live down my past.

  I’m not throwing myself a pity party. Most of the time things are fine, really, but sometimes ... well, sometimes I miss my foster mother, Mystique. At least I knew that she cared about me, even if she did have kind of a funny way of showing it.

  May 26

  Rogue threw a little tantrum today, so I took over for a while to give her a chance to cool off. It seems that she got into a heated argument with Alison Blaire and it almost escalated into physical violence. Dazzler is one of the more formidable X-Men, but I’m not sure that even her impressive powers would win out over Rogue’s (my) brute force in a one-on-one match. I don’t know why Rogue does this; not only does she regret it later, but it doesn’t win her any points with the others, either. For someone who worries so much about fitting in, and I know she does, she doesn’t make much of an effort to play nice.